The Cocoa Tree Blossom

This delicate and beautiful Cocoa Tree flower is the starting point of chocolate.
The elegant pink and white flowers will eventually produce the cocoa fruit that become chocolate.

After two years of age the trees carry their first flowers, a delicate pink sepal and white and yellow petals. The flowers grow directly on the trunk and the larger branches.

The flowers blossom uninterruptedly and, depending on circumstances, number between 50’000 and 100’000 per year on a single tree, a prodigious feat of nature which produces only 20 to 30 fruit a year.

Many, many flowers but just a small production of fruit. Pollination is carried out by miniscule fruit flies and on average only one flower out of 2000 develops into a fruit. But what a fruit!